For those who have lived in abusive relationships, the illogical yet very real set of dynamics that we have already discussed between perpetrators and victims may be familiar to you – even predictable despite how illogical they are. However, people caught up in those dynamics may or may not realize there is yet another danger for potential harm coming from yet another unexpected source. It’s possible that people and/or organizations or institutions who have purposed intentions to assist or help victims can become an additional source of extreme harm. I’m referring to professionals and lay people in the fields of psychiatry, social work, and/or religious faith, even the Christian church. Harm can be the unintentional outcome of well-meaning intervention, or even strategically intentional harm coming from a base of self-appointed authority for the betterment of either the victim or society in general. In other words, people or organizations can and sometimes do decide that they are better equipped,qualified, or informed to know what is needed in response to an abusive and/or unhealthy relationship than the victim; and furthermore they may have the credentials or authority to impose restrictions and/or interventions upon the victim or the victim’s family against his/her will. They may do so because they are convinced that they know better what is necessary for the benefit of the victim or the victim’s family; or they may do so because they prioritize what is “best” (in their own estimation) for society in total disregard for what is best for the victim. Their motivation can either be genuinely good or diabolically indifferent. In the end, the motives have little bearing on how traumatizing the interventions are for the victim or the victim’s family.
I will share a few personal examples to help you see how this can play out:
1) At one point in our treatment we were under the care of a well renowned psychiatrist in the field of MPD/DID. In a private counseling session, he asked me if my internal children ever interacted with my external children. He did this without giving any indication that it was intended to do anything more than help him better counsel us. We spoke openly and honestly about the relationships that had developed between our external children and our internal children. To us he showed no sign or indication that he was in any way disturbed by this information, and his counsel to us from that point on gave no indication that he was concerned about these relationships. However, he had theorized that it was unhealthy for external children to have any contact with internal children; and without our knowledge proceeded with efforts to engage the court system to permanently remove our children from our care. He falsified legal and therapeutic documentation intended to impose his conclusions onto our family. I learned of these things after the fact through my legal representation which I was cut off from while under his care.
2) Shortly prior to the time I was under that doctor’s care, I had been hospitalized for an extended amount of time. I was very concerned about the welfare of my children while I was not in the home to care for them and protect them from the uncontrolled rage of my ex-husband. In fact, I was so concerned for the well being of my children that I was unable to focus on the things I needed to while in this psychiatric hospitalization so that I would be able to return home to care for my children myself. For this reason I contacted social services and requested that they provide temporary placements for the children just for the time I was hospitalized. Once we signed the legal documentation necessary for this to happen, things took a nasty turn.
Unknown to me/us, the social services in our area (and apparently around the USA) operate off some faulty assumptions. Assumption 1: All victims of severe sexual assault become perpetrators of sexual crimes against their own children. Assumption 2: All persons with the diagnosis of MPD/DID are victims of severe sexual assault. Faulty conclusion: All persons with the diagnosis of MPD/DID perpetrate sexual crimes against their children. (It is technically illegal for them to institute this obvious bias against a specific psychiatric diagnosis, but that didn’t dissuade them.) With this as a basis, social service set out to permanently remove our children from our care. They instituted through the court system restrictions on all my contacts with my children that are generally reserved for persons convicted of sexual crimes against children. They attempted to get our children to state that they had been sexually assaulted by us. They went to great lengths (legal and illegal) to present a case to the judge to remove the children from my care permanently. They, along with the cooperation of the doctor from example #1, set out to destroy our family. In the end, it required a miraculous intervention that only God could have orchestrated to extricate our family from this situation. We would be foolish to assume that it couldn’t happen again; and that is one of the primary reasons we are taking care to keep our real identity from being known on this site. All over the USA families are being destroyed; and when you get down to the root causes or reasons this destruction is being based upon, it boils down to some faulty theories and assumptions of a few highly educated and acclaimed professionals who think their views don’t need to be substantiated by verifiable facts or data.
3) This third example from our personal history is the most painful to report. Everything (but not everyone) inside desperately want to justify the actions of this institution, yet it would be false and negligent to leave them out. That is the institution of our church family – the body of believers we were involved in and members of at the time the above things were going on.
There were really two points at which they became involved in perpetrating grave injustices against us as a multiple and us as a family. The first took place prior to the instances discussed above. Before I went to social services for support for our family in the midst of the hospitalizations and upheaval characteristic of the early years of both medical and psychiatric crisis, I went to our denomination and our local body of believers. With only good intentions, they established a group for the sole purpose of providing opportunity for our family to heal. However, they were unprepared and unwilling to learn how to address the real issue of spousal abuse, and the family they arranged to provide care for the children was poorly chosen and poorly supervised. Consequently the temporary separation from my now ex-husband was too shortly lived due to my children pleading tearfully for me to get them out of the situation they were in. There are so many “if only”s involved in this story, but the bottom line was that their unwillingness to deal with the real issues involved caused them to enact policies and make decisions that were detrimental and traumatic for the children and our family. We felt we had no viable alternative but to abort this effort.
The second time was when our church became involved in the scheme of social services to secretly “supervise” all my interactions with my children while we were in church. At first social services prevented the children from being able to attend our church while under their supervision, but I objected to this obvious offense against my children’s religious freedoms (and at this point I had descent legal representation to enforce my objections). When they could no longer prevent me from having unsupervised contact with my children while at church, social services arranged with the pastor who got the deaconate involved in secretly watching over all interactions between my children and me while at church activities. I learned of this first from a member of the deaconate who was miserably uncomfortable and painful obvious about her role in this secret supervision. It was later confirmed by my lawyer. Far too many church people became informed about the accusations of social services, and it was assumed by church members that social service had to have just cause for their assertions. We were humiliated with no real way to defend against or deny the accusations against us, and our pastor – the man who should have been a source of encouragement and comfort, was cooperating and siding with our perpetrators. It was an excruciatingly lonely and vulnerable time in our life. However,there was one very dear older saint who was a member of the deaconate who intentionally sat directly behind the children and me/us every week during worship services. Each week she would wrap her loving arms around us and whisper in our ear that no one with eyes could possibly believe that I would hurt our little ones. She hugged each one of the kids and praised them for their good behavior and sweet dispositions. She was a shining beacon of love and acceptance in a very dark time in our lives. She has since gone on to heaven, but her ministry to me is still worth more than money could buy, and we continue to miss her greatly.
We have been asked why we continued to attend worship services with this body of believers. There was nothing to prevent us from attending elsewhere, especially after the whole ordeal with social services ended – but our primary concern was for our children. With so many other things in their lives going haywire on them, the support and security they had in their relationships related to our church were lifelines for them. Even though I was humiliated, the children were not. It seemed to us a cruel injustice to the children to take them away from their church home at such a vulnerable and unstable time in their lives.
How do we end a post like this? What conclusions can tie a pretty ribbon around this? I wish I knew a way. I can say that I have reconciled differences with the pastor, and he has affirmed that he would do things very differently now than he did then. He was at a loss to know how to respond in the situation as it was presented to him, and he made some regrettable choices. He is forgiven. I attend worship at a different church now, but some of our children continue to worship in that congregation and are very activley involved in the functions of that church, so I still have occasion to go back from time to time. Very few people ever learned of my innocence, and I doubt many care very much now that the children are grown; but at any rate they are cordial towards me when I am there. The point of putting this information on this blog is that sometimes people can get involved in perpetrating grievous offenses without any intentions of doing so. They may even be intending to be helpful in their interventions, yet these fact do not diminish the harm that is done.
